A number of different properties may be used to describe a display object, whether the display object is a graphical object that includes shapes or another type of display object. A display object may include shape properties as well as text character properties, text paragraph properties, text body properties, group shape properties, and the like. Shape properties form a “language” for describing a visual object we think of as a shape. A shape has a transform (location, scale, rotation, skew, etc.), a path (rectangle, oval, star, banner, etc.), a fill style (none, solid color, texture, etc.), a line style (none, solid color, texture, etc.) and several other properties. The set of shape properties is often referred to as the Shape Property Bag (SPB). Some solutions store the set of properties related to an object as a flat list fields that encompassed all possible values of a particular concept. For example, the fill style on a shape could be either a solid color or a texture, but even when the fill was a solid color, an entry in the flat table was still supplied for the texture type of fill. This storage structure may create a security concern of stale information sitting around in properties not being used. Also, the flat storage may cause cross-references between properties or additional properties to be included in the flat storage structure that are included to simply reference the valid shape property that is to be applied to the shape.